1. decapitate, behead, decollate -- (cut the head of; "the French King was beheaded during the Revolution")

1.

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant but it did not fall over. - from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

2.

The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. - from Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

3.

It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. - from Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

4.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought. - from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

5.

As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office. - from Ulysses by James Joyce